The Ancient Regime. Taine Hippolyte

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СКАЧАТЬ before we can obtain an accurate and complete idea of a great people. A people which has lived a people's age, and which still lives! But it is the only way to avoid the unsound construction based on a meaningless planning. I promised myself that, for my own part, if I should some day undertake to form a political opinion, it would be only after having studied France.

      What is contemporary France? To answer this question we must know how this France is formed, or, what is still better, to act as spectator at its formation. At the end of the last century (in 1789), like a molting insect, it underwent a metamorphosis. Its ancient organization is dissolved; it tears away its most precious tissues and falls into convulsions, which seem mortal. Then, after multiplied throes and a painful lethargy, it re-establishes itself. But its organization is no longer the same: by silent interior travail a new being is substituted for the old. In 1808, its leading characteristics are decreed and defined: departments, arondissements, cantons and communes, no change have since taken place in its exterior divisions and functions. Concordat, Code, Tribunals, University, Institute, Prefects, Council of State, Taxes, Collectors, Cours des Comptes, a uniform and centralized administration, its principal organs, are still the same. Nobility, commoners, artisans, peasants, each class has henceforth the position, the sentiments, the traditions which we see at the present day (1875). Thus the new creature is at once stable and complete; consequently its structure, its instincts and its faculties mark in advance the circle within which its thought and its action will be stimulated. Around it, other nations, some more advanced, others less developed, all with greater caution, some with better results, attempt similarly a transformation from a feudal to a modern state; the process takes place everywhere and all but simultaneously. But, under this new system as beneath the ancient, the weak is always the prey of the strong. Woe to those (nations) whose retarded evolution exposes them to the neighbor suddenly emancipated from his chrysalis state, and is the first to go forth fully armed! Woe likewise to him whose too violent and too abrupt evolution has badly balanced his internal economy. Who, through the exaggeration of his governing forces, through the deterioration of his deep-seated organs, through the gradual impoverishment of his vital tissues is condemned to commit inconsiderate acts, to debility, to impotency, amidst sounder and better-balanced neighbors! In the organization, which France effected for herself at the beginning of the (19th) century, all the general lines of her contemporary history were traced. Her political revolutions, social Utopias, division of classes, role of the church, conduct of the nobility, of the middle class, and of the people, the development, the direction, or deviation of philosophy, of letters and of the arts. That is why, should we wish to understand our present condition our attention always reverts to the terrible and fruitful crisis by which the ancient regime produced the Revolution, and the Revolution the new regime.

      Ancient régime, Revolution, new régime, I am going to try to describe these three conditions with exactitude. I have no other object in view. A historian may be allowed the privilege of a naturalist; I have regarded my subject the same as the metamorphosis of an insect. Moreover, the event is so interesting in itself that it is worth the trouble of being observed for its own sake, and no effort is required to suppress one's ulterior motives. Freed from all prejudice, curiosity becomes scientific and may be completely concentrated on the secret forces, which guide the wonderful process. These forces are the situation, the passions, the ideas, the wills of each group of actors, and which can be defined and almost measured. They are in full view; we are not reduced to conjectures about them, to uncertain divination, to vague indications. By singular good fortune we perceive the men themselves, their exterior and their interior. The Frenchmen of the ancient régime are still within visual range. All of us, in our youth, (around 1840–50), have encountered one or more of the survivors of this vanished society. Many of their dwellings, with the furniture, still remain intact. Their pictures and engravings enable us to take part in their domestic life, see how they dress, observe their attitudes and follow their movements. Through their literature, philosophy, scientific pursuits, gazettes, and correspondence, we can reproduce their feeling and thought, and even enjoy their familiar conversation. The multitude of memoirs, issuing during the past thirty years from public and private archives, lead us from one drawing room to another, as if we bore with us so many letters of introduction. The independent descriptions by foreign travelers, in their journals and correspondence, correct and complete the portraits, which this society has traced of itself. Everything that it could state has been stated, except,

      * what was commonplace and well-known to contemporaries,

      * whatever seemed technical, tedious and vulgar,

      * whatever related to the provinces, to the bourgeoisie, the peasant, to the laboring man, to the government, and to the household.

It has been my aim to fill this void, and make France known to others outside the small circle of the literary and the cultivated. Owing to the kindness of M. Maury0011 and the precious indications of M. Boutaric, I have been able to examine a mass of manuscript documents. These include the correspondence of a large number of intendants, (the Royal governor of a large district), the directors of customs and tax offices, legal officers, and private persons of every kind and of every degree during the thirty last years of the ancient regime. Also included are the reports and registers of the various departments of the royal household, the reports and registers of the States General in 176 volumes, the dispatches of military officers in 1789 and 1790, letters, memoirs and detailed statistics preserved in the one hundred boxes of the ecclesiastical committee, the correspondence, in 94 bundles, of the department and municipal authorities with the ministries from 1790 to 1799, the reports of the Councilors of State on their mission at the end of 1801, the reports of prefects under the Consulate, the Empire, and the Restoration down to 1823. There is such a quantity of unknown and instructive documents besides these that the history of the Revolution seems, indeed, to be still unwritten. In any event, it is only such documents, which can make all these people come alive. The lesser nobles, the curates, the monks, the nuns of the provinces, the aldermen and bourgeoisie of the towns, the attorneys and syndics of the country villages, the laborers and artisans, the officers and the soldiers. These alone enable us to contemplate and appreciate in detail the various conditions of their existence, the interior of a parsonage, of a convent, of a town-council, the wages of a workman, the produce of a farm, the taxes levied on a peasant, the duties of a tax-collector, the expenditure of a noble or prelate, the budget, retinue and ceremonial of a court. Thanks to such resources, we are able to give precise figures, to know hour by hour the occupations of a day and, better still, read off the bill of fare of a grand dinner, and recompose all parts of a full-dress costume. We have even, on the one hand, samples of the materials of the dresses worn by Marie Antoinette, pinned on paper and classified by dates. And on the other hand, we can tell what clothes were worn by the peasant, describe the bread he ate, specify the flour it was made of, and state the cost of a pound of it in sous and deniers.0012 With such resources one becomes almost contemporary with the men whose history one writes and, more than once, in the Archives, I have, while tracing their old handwriting on the time-stained paper before me, been tempted to speak aloud with them.

      H. A. Taine, August 1875.

      0011 (return) [ Taine's friend who was the director of the French National Archives. (SR.)]

      0012 (return) [ One sou equals ½0th of a franc or 5 centimes. 12 deniers equaled one sou. (SR.)]

BOOK FIRST. THE STRUCTURE OF THE ANCIENT SOCIETY.

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